One spring evening, Georgina Bloomberg arrived at the Pierre Hotel, where she was being honored by the animal-welfare group NYC Second Chance Rescue. She’d brought Justin Waterman, her fiancé, but had left her three rescue dogs at home.
“Is he yours?” a photographer asked, nodding toward Waterman, a financial adviser.
“Yes, he’s mine,” said Bloomberg, a prize-winning equestrian who splits her time between Manhattan, Westchester, and Florida. She has been interested in the well-being of animals since she was a little girl. Now forty, she’s been on plenty of gnarly rescue missions (sometimes with Amanda Hearst, a fellow New York heiress), raiding puppy mills and airlifting strays from the Caribbean on the family jet. (Her father is Michael Bloomberg.)
Nearby, several dogs up for adoption waited in promlike attire (a pit bull named Lonnie, with a missing ear, wore a pink tutu) and tussled beneath chandeliers. Someone handed Bloomberg a squirming, lick-happy pup in a blue bow tie, for a photo; for a moment, it looked like her silky black dress might get shredded. She put her nose to the nape of the dog’s neck and inhaled for a long time, as if from a bong.
“There’s nothing like the smell of a puppy’s head,” she said.
Bloomberg estimates that she is involved with “a couple of dozen” animal-rescue outfits. There are now close to a hundred and fifty such groups in the city, according to Best Friends Animal Society, an advocacy organization. It puts the number of local dogs and cats that are saved from euthanasia every year at around seventy thousand—almost the same count as the city’s homeless population.
Bloomberg has become a kind of empress ambassador of the rescue world, which blew up after so many videos circulated of pets that were abandoned during Hurricane Katrina. (Animal-lovers, like purveyors of portable toilets, have a thing for cute names. Some of the newer rescue organizations are Rescuzilla, Posh Pets, and Stray from the Heart.) Low-key and no-nonsense, like her father, Bloomberg knows the inside details—for instance, that black dogs are harder to place for adoption, and that pit bulls are not among the most aggressive breeds. She also tells her son that the only thing he is allowed to brag about is having rescue pets. Besides dogs and horses, these have included a pig, a mule, a chicken, and a goat.
After dinner and her speech, in which she said that she was honored to be honored, she stopped at the coat check. “I want to be known for going on rescue trips more than going to parties,” she said. She was dashing home to catch a Rangers game. “But, if I have to put on a dress and show up for things like this, I’m willing to do it.”
A few days later, Bloomberg walked into Versa, an airy lounge at a midtown hotel, where she was co-hosting a cocktail party benefitting Rescue Dogs Rock NYC. There were no dogs to kiss, but Lara Trump, the event’s other co-host, wanted to embrace. She had flown up from Florida, where she’d recently helped organize a fashion-show fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago for Big Dog Ranch Rescue; her father-in-law, the former President, told guests at the event that she was terrific but that the country was in trouble. (Big Dog Ranch Rescue got into some trouble itself when I.R.S. filings revealed that the organization has provided Trump properties with nearly two million dollars in fund-raising-related revenue.)
Trump approached Bloomberg and said, “Hi, honey,” her hair and teeth gleaming. She wore a taut dress with embedded sparkles and a plunging back. “It’s New York, so we’re all in black.”
All business, in a Zara blazer, Bloomberg greeted the founders of Rescue Dogs Rock, and Trump followed suit. The organization had rehabilitated a beagle named Ben that Trump fostered, and then adopted, with her big-game-hunting husband, Eric. She posts a lot of dog content (she calls herself a “foster failure,” because she kept Ben) on Instagram, along with attacks on the January 6th Committee and rants about election interference, Letitia James, trans athletes, and Hunter Biden.
During a press briefing and photo op, a Daily Mail reporter had some questions for Bloomberg. Was she friends with Ivanka Trump? (Yes.) Was it true that Anna Wintour had her own bathroom at the Met Ball? (Uncertain.) Would she dump a boyfriend if he didn’t love dogs? (Yes.) Would she accept a donation from Archewell, the charity of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex?
“My mother would never forgive me,” Bloomberg replied, referring to Susan Brown, who is English.
She looked in need of rescue herself by then, and began to back away from her inquisitors. “I promised I would be home in time for dinner,” she said. As Trump started in on her rescue-dog stump speech (“Right now, it’s a dire situation for animals around this country”), Bloomberg was gone. ♦
